Decathlon Design

In my last blog post I mentioned that my class is participating in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competition through the creation of a user interface for the house. We will be developing a web site to efficiently administrate the house using the Wicket framework. Before we can create an administration website, the web page design must be finalized so that there exists consistency between web pages. Without consistency, every student could possible create a differing interfaces inside a single web application. In the end, web page inconsistency would confuse the user. For this assignment, I will be working with Shoji Bravo and Michael Cera.

For the design aspect, Balsamiq gave every student a license for this competition. In order to introduce consistency into my groups website, each of us created one basic template based off of previous design that we created on our own. For my design I decided that I would incorporate Shoji’s use of big buttons on the home page for navigation. Shoji’s design reminded me of a interface similar to Ubuntu’s netbook remix edition where the user would click on a button to access the programs.

For this project, the team stored all of the designs in Google’s project hosting. Google project hosting is a wonderful tool for its ability to track issues and commits to the project. Ideally, there should not be any one person working harder than another due to ability to audit Google’s tracking. How are tasks divided equally without alienating a developer? In my teams case, each member chose his first web page to create based upon personal preference. The second web page was decided through a quick game of rock-paper-scissors.

As this is the first time that I have used the Google project issues tracker, one problem that I have to solve is how to set an issue to completed status. Currently, my issue is still represented as accepted, not completed. Other than that, updating the task with comments are simple.

Edit :I guess my eyes rolled over the status box because later on a classmate pointed out it out to me.